This is a book that began life as the vaguest thread of a simple idea without much of any real or intentioned substance that might have given it any real purpose or any perceivable direction. It is a book about the author’s own perceptions and ideas about how existence might still maintain of this life when material existence no longer has any immediate relevance for its continuing perpetuation. It has, however, evolved since that time into a serious exercise in expressive writing but with the primary emphasis directed always toward literary coloration and an attempt at imaginative dexterity. We exist today within a maelstrom of questionable misconceptions that remain convenient to our particular life moments and to which we all religiously adhere as the necessary requirement of our accustomed conditioning, with the basic tenet of que sera enabling us all to more comfortably maintain our daily lives in the manner that is most fitting to our purpose. This little effort began as a project based on an entirely hypothetical concept—the merest product of a rampant imagination. It is in no way intended as a statement of any of the popular convictions or beliefs that prevail today but is offered instead simply as a work of fiction and as little else. It does, however, express the sympathies and inclinations of the writer in the direction of his own thoughts and of his own suspicions. We all appear to be comfortable with our own philosophical concepts regarding the perpetuity of our own existences, and why should that not be the case? It might be helpful, however, particularly for those seekers of life questions to take a long look into the eyes of a new born child and explore some of the solutions to those mysteries that are lying there waiting to be discovered.

The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.

Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History explores the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry and as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While dreams have been a sustained object of fascination from the ancient world to the present, what sets this period apart is the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences, and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices. Authors Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty examine how the intensification and cross-fertilization of ideas about dreams in this period became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and vernacular domains. In uncovering a complex and diverse archive, Dreams and Modernity reveals how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. Individual chapters in the book explore popular traditions of dream interpretation in the 19th century; the archival impetus of dream research in this period, including the Society for Psychical Research and the Mass Observation movement; and the reception and extension of Freud’s dream book in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. This engaging interdisciplinary book will appeal to both scholars and upper level students of cultural studies, cultural history, Victorian studies, literary studies, gender studies and modernist studies.

Expanded from a special issue of the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, this volume contains some of the most interesting and promising work on dreams coming from therapists and researchers working at the crossroads of cognitive therapy and other systemsófrom a reprint of Beck's only article on cognition and dreams to the influence of modern neurobiology on the use of dreams in cognitive therapy. These chapters provide a meta-theory of drams that is unique to the cognitive perspective. As such, they begin the process of generating a comprehensive cognitive model of dream work that includes cognitive, affective, physical and behavioral features from which future research and clinical innovations can be built.

A magical concoction of the mischievous, tender, whimsical, and debauched real-life adventures of Alan Cumming, told in his own words and pictures. Described by the New York Times as “a bawdy countercultural sprite” and named one of the most fun people in show business by Time magazine, Alan Cumming is a genuine quadruple threat—an internationally acclaimed, award-winning star of stage, television, and film, as well as a New York Times best-selling author whose real-life vivacity, wit, and charm shine through every page of his third book, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams. In these forty-five picture essays, Cumming recounts his real-life adventures (and often, misadventures), illustrated by his own equally entertaining photographs. From an awkward bonding session with Elizabeth Taylor to poignant stories about his family and friends to some harsh words of wisdom imparted by Oprah that make up the title of this collection, You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams is as eclectic, enchanting, and alive as its author.

The importance of this collection of writings of William James lies in the fact that it has been arranged to provide a systematic introduction to his major philosophical discoveries, and precisely to those doctrines and theories that are of most burning current interest. William James: The Essential Writings is a series of philosophical arguments on some of the most "obscure and head-cracking problems" in contemporary philosophy; the relation of thought to its object; the interrelationships between meaning and truth; the levels and structures of experience; the degrees of reality; the nature of the embodied self; the relation of ethics, aesthetics, and religious experience to man's strenuously and "heroically" active nature; and, above all, the structurization of the experienced life-world as the validating ground and origin of all theory; Bruce Wilshire has provided an introduction to William James's thought on these and other related points which is at once both substantial and subtle.